Potter character killed, but which one?

J. K. Rowling was so upset after killing off one of the main characters in the latest Harry Potter book that she burst into tears.

She recounts how, after completing the final rewrite of the death, she wandered into her kitchen crying - to meet with incomprehension from her husband.

Ms Rowling, who has not disclosed the identity of the doomed character even to her husband, says she believes that children's authors have to be "ruthless killers".

But in an interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC TV's Newsnight, she says that she "dreads leaving Harry" when she writes the final book about the young wizard.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth and most heavily publicised instalment in the series, comes out at midnight tomorrow.");document.write("

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Encouraged by record pre-release sales, the publishers predict that it will be the best-selling Potter adventure yet and have printed about 8.5 million copies.

The 766-page book took three years to produce, but Ms Rowling denies that she suffered writer's block, as some reports have suggested.

She says: "I had rewritten the death, rewritten it and that was it - it was definitive. I walked into the kitchen crying and Neil said to me: 'What on Earth is wrong?' and I said, 'Well, I have just killed the person'.

"Neil doesn't know who the person is and he said: 'Well, don't do it then'. I thought, a doctor, you know . . . and I said: 'Well, it just doesn't work like that. You are writing children's books . . . you need to be a ruthless killer'."